


The Wren with Sorrows Small

by oubliance



Category: A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-27
Packaged: 2017-12-08 13:40:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/761966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oubliance/pseuds/oubliance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vignettes from 1789. Now with added Fabre and Mirabeau!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 'Or else I shall be lost' (Versailles)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set before July.  
> [](http://www.tracemyip.org/)  
> 

‘I don’t need a bed,’ Camille says.

‘Camille, I insist. Don’t be silly, you can’t sleep in a chair every night.’

‘Lucky to have a chair … ’

‘Perhaps, but foolish to refuse something better.’ He wants to say: Camille, you terrify me. What has happened, how can I help you, why do you look so pale? To have Camille by his side again is a private, wrenching sweetness – he hardly dares confess, even to himself, how much he hoped for this. And if, half the time, Camille is running after Mirabeau, Laclos, de Sillery? It doesn’t matter. Some nights he cannot face them: he seeks out Max’s room, quiet, bread and butter, two candles burning. Enough light to read by, and no arguments, no anger.

Camille says, ‘Oh, I don’t mind at all,’ and Max swallows his own words. He cannot say that he would give Camille much more than a little space on his rough mattress, would give him –

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘I’m blowing out both candles in five minutes.’ He hears himself speak as if through a tunnel, or from the bottom of a well: as if he is sixteen again and Camille half a brother, half a pupil. He gently takes the pen from Camille’s hand and lays it aside.

Camille thinks, not even one night off, then. He stands up, sliding out of his coat.

Three minutes, four: Max puffs out the candles. The room blackens and softens. He gets into bed carefully, feels Camille’s skin strike cold through a thin shirt. He can smell the sweet, unusual scent of his friend’s hair, and he touches it, smoothing it back from the cool brow: like Euryalus, he thinks. And he thinks, Camille has been lonely, hasn’t he? Oh, he’s had people around him, but no one who understood: no one from Louis-le-Grand, no one who knew him when he was a child.

Max thinks, I shouldn’t say anything; it will embarrass him. But before the thought is finished, he is speaking: ‘Camille, I’m here now. I’m here - and there’s much to be done, of course. But you can come to me if you’re in trouble, as you used to; you won’t be alone.’

Camille, who is hardly ever alone, tries to thank him, but his words won’t come for the wanting. He supposes that after their years apart, even Max will be less endowed with scruples than he was: more than other men, undoubtedly, but not so many that he, Camille, isn’t welcomed. The style of entertainment differs from Mirabeau’s, to be sure, but the visitor is always the same. He closes his eyes and presses his face into Max’s neck, suddenly half-frightened. He wants above all to sleep.

Max says, ‘Camille.’ Lovely as Euryalus, he thinks. The sea-black eyes, their lids, their lashes, and the fear there. Oh, my dearest friend –

Camille says, ‘All right.’ The bedclothes are loose and he pushes them weakly aside; his hands are stiff with writing, his mouth already sore. 

Max knows that it cannot be happening, but it is. And whether he has corrupted Camille, or Camille him, is almost unimportant. He tries to stay silent because gasping with pleasure, surely, would compound the crime. But his throat is dry and he swallows: it sounds obscenely loud. He touches the top of the frail head to which that mouth belongs - that impossible mouth, and it can't be Camille's, not really - unsure if he is thanking, blessing, or forgiving.

It’s over soon and Camille curls at his side, clinging to him, asking for nothing, his little fingers clenched in the sleeve of Max’s night-gown, watching the black room, his mind entirely empty.


	2. 'Lo what a fiend is here' (Paris: July)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set after 'Killing Time'.  
> [](http://www.tracemyip.org/)  
> 

François Robert kisses his cheek. It’s like praise for a good child, and Louise clasps his hand, saying, ‘Don’t let anybody hurt you, Camille.’ As though I possessed some valuable prerogative of declining pain, he thinks, and walks out into the hot, dew-damp street where bloodless air touches his throat and his face, washing through his clothes like a dawn sweat.

In Camille’s mind, tides come and go – and with them driftwood, detritus, nausea, courage, the bodies of the drowned. Now at least he can stand up and smile a little, put on his clothes and go outside. No one is about. Louise’s voice keeps humming in his head, ‘Be careful, be careful - ’ 

She put another cup of coffee into Camille’s hands, and steadied them as if he was either very young or very old. 

Camille thinks: when she did that, my sense of peril diminished for the first time in, perhaps, seven weeks. But was it an illusion? Was the coffee altogether real, and did Louise touch him? He stops walking, looks at the cut on his hand, wonders how he got it, because what he remembers cannot be right.

In his mind, Camille sees a painting of himself, grotesquely small above a crowd of shouting dogs. He closes his eyes and touches the cut. He scratches at it with his nails for a moment: the scab doesn’t hold and at once there are beads of blood under his fingertips, sticky and miniscule. Camille hears a jostle of women pass by. They pay him no attention, for who looks at a wan boy loitering in the street? Who follows him, and who hands him a gun?

I should not have left Louise Robert, Camille thinks, I don’t remember why I decided to go. He is about to cry in the public street: because no one tells you what to do afterwards, when you’ve lost the guns, your eloquence, and more hours than it seems safe to reckon. He looks up at the melting house before him, not knowing where he is: but it’s Annette’s house, so he knocks on the door.

Camille’s unholy luck has not run out, for Claude is absent. Mutely, he holds out the bleeding palm, and Annette says, ‘Mercy, Camille ... If that’s the worst that’s befallen you – ’

She does not like to finish the sentence, and she does not need to: Camille surrenders to her as he always has. Silent while she binds the cut, while she grazes his cheekbone with her warm fingers; silent while she sets the bowl of bloody water on the sideboard, and when she comes back to him, sitting beside him, picking up his injured hand. At length the tears spill, and she asks if he is hurt anywhere else. No, he is not. His throat aches with speaking, forcing a loud voice, but that’s nothing. 

‘Camille,’ Lucile says softly. She stands in the doorway, a book in her hand. ‘No one told me you were here.’ Her heart is like a fresh summer apple broken in twain, at the sight of him weeping.

‘He’s been having a fine old time,’ Annette says.

‘Don’t,' says her daughter, 'How can you?’

Annette would like to explain that Camille is not really grieving. He is too excited, too dangerous: sharper than the blade that cut him, she thinks. ‘I won’t have you cooing, Lucile,' she says, 'Like a bad play ... Not now.’

Lucile stands in front of him. ‘You came to see me?’ she says. Without looking up, Camille nods. The tears are cooling on his face and he would like to lean against Annette and go to sleep, but he can’t risk Claude, not today. God knows what he might do, changed as he is! He might find another gun and shoot Lucile’s father, abduct her, force himself on Annette, on Adèle ...

He shivers, and Annette rubs the back of his hand with her thumb, in a slow motion.

‘I must go to Versailles,’ Camille whispers. He can’t think of the way, or remember his last meal. He’s not altogether sure of the name of the town where he was born. He says, ‘Annette,’ and closes his eyes again, and then he says, ‘Lucile,’ and feels one of them touch his hair.

‘You can stay here a while.’ The voice is Annette’s. ‘Claude won’t be back – oh, for an hour, perhaps two.’

‘I must go to Versailles,’ Camille repeats. ‘I must, I’m sorry.’ Mirabeau is in Versailles: and if, as recent events suggest, Camille needs someone to control him, there is no better candidate. He feels something that might be sickness, desire, or the two compounded by a master-apothecary – bewildering him, whoever he is now.


	3. 'Where my Sun-flower wishes to go' (Paris: July)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set a few days after the previous chapter.  
> [](http://www.tracemyip.org/)  
> 

_Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,_  
 _Who countest the steps of the Sun:_  
 _Seeking after that sweet golden clime_  
 _Where the travellers journey is done._

 

*

Théroigne accosted him outside the theatre, saying, ‘What have you done, Camille?’ He pointed to his throat, an excuse for silence. Did she want to reproach him or to offer him, in her new manner (which is heroic but accompanied – already this disconcerts him – by a gaze both blank and soft) some sort of encouragement? If nobody pushes me up on a table, he thinks, slipping through the door into Fabre’s dim-lit labyrinth – why, it’s a day wasted. Théroigne has been suggesting that she danced with him on the roof of the Bastille, to the wistful music of the people’s voices. 

Other nights, she describes de Launay’s bayoneting as if her girlhood saw no warbling of operetta songs, but a long tutelage in piglets, capons, dead lambs for Louis’s board. A plenitude of flesh. Camille bites his lip as the angelus rings distantly. He tries to imagine Anne Théroigne in his arms: she would scratch at his back, pull his hair. 

*

Early this morning, he leaned against Mirabeau, under examination. Mirabeau’s hand curled round his neck: heavy as gold. Scholarship boy, he thinks now – but then there were hardly any thoughts at all. Summer rain hung in the air beyond the window: six of the clock, a shower before the heat. He spoke as if by rote. And then they gave me the guns, he said. They lifted me on their shoulders. 

‘Good boy,’ Mirabeau said. And then, ‘Don’t look sulky, don’t squander it.’

I am twenty-nine, Camille thought. He said, ‘And de Launay – nobody meant it, but it happened. It was necessary.’

‘I try to picture you covered with blood.’ Mirabeau picked up Camille’s hand, squeezing the fingers too tightly. ‘And I’m not altogether convinced, Camille.’

‘You will be.’

*

When Fabre seizes his wrist, Camille gasps aloud. They’re in the theatre, hotter than outside. ‘Come with me,’ Fabre says. 

The sun dazzles, fires the windows, glazes the dirty streets, calls up fumes and sickness. He’s tempted to close his eyes: Fabre is holding him, guiding him. My throat hurts terribly, he thinks. All those speeches. Sweat gathers inside his cravat and under his arms, because even this shirt – worn and washed until the cuffs are frayed, the linen filmy – is too thick. 

Fabre knows the price of a shirt. He’s never importunate with linen, never rips: with discipline, he unfastens the buttons and peels it away from Camille’s wet skin. He folds it and puts it aside. Whether or not Camille realises, this is part of today’s lesson. Even hurried by desire, a man who finds himself hard-pressed for clothing shouldn’t crush his scant belongings underfoot, nor let his lover so mistreat them. The air in Fabre’s apartment is ready to boil, and for a moment he stands back, watching Camille, marooned naked in the middle of the floor. 

He makes no attempt to hide himself: you would think him brazen, if not for the chagrin pooled in his eyes. Drops of sweat run over his ribs and down his legs; one marks his cheek like a tear, and Fabre says, ‘Lie on the bed, then.’

*

He means to begin in the usual way, which takes a few minutes and permits him, once Camille is limp with release, to do more interesting things. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he says. ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t tell me this is the effect of celebrity, or I shall lay down my aspiring pen for good.’ 

Camille turns his head away. There must, he supposes, be something wrong. He cares less than he ought to: the heat is nauseating.

Fabre is positively irritated, and the irritation persists even when his efforts begin to work. ‘My wrist aches,’ he says. ‘You should be bloody grateful.’ 

‘Thank you.’ A woman begins to sing in a room somewhere above them, and Camille recognises the music. It’s one of Fabre’s songs: as this woman sings it, the tune seems more forlorn than the words.

For a moment, Fabre listens, then sniffs. He says, ‘No training,’ and then, ‘Oh, Camille, don’t even think about it.’ Camille hears him stand up and cross the room. There is a rustle of papers. Then Fabre is back, and he touches Camille’s wrist with two fingers as though he wants to feel his pulse. ‘Indiscipline is all very well, if all you want is to rile up a crowd occasionally, when your feelings get the better of you. But I don’t suppose you’ll be popular at the Breton Club, will you?’

Camille moves on the bed, thinking of Mirabeau with the club trailing behind him.

‘Stop it,’ Fabre says. ‘It’s the same problem, Camille. Tongue, nerves, prick. You’ll never do a thing, without restraint.’

But he has done something: hasn’t Fabre heard? 

*

Fabre’s fingers are busy once more, but they don’t seek to please him. Something is being tied – 

‘No,’ Camille says, his throat narrowing. ‘Please, Fabre – ’

‘You never wear those hair-ribbons any more,’ Fabre says, ‘It’s the tape from a bundle of music.’

I don’t care what it is, Camille thinks. If he cries as he would like to, Fabre will probably take it off, but the same fear that asks for tears keeps them pent behind his eyes, though the sweat on his face mimics sorrow. 

Fabre holds his wrists and begins to talk in a considered voice about Maître d’Anton and his dark-eyed wife. Supposing they go to bed early, does he unpin her hair? Or if he comes home late, with wine on his breath: does he have to coax her, or is she eager? 

He lets go of one wrist, noting with interest that Camille makes no effort to free himself. ‘You look pretty,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen a lot of pretty girls, usually by thirty they start to go off. Useful, to discover you’ve some capacity for stirring up a crowd. People will still keep you in pay once your looks go.’ Examining Camille’s face, he sees the first tears. ‘Don’t be vain, Camille. Even Gabrielle d’Anton’s lost her first freshness.’ 

Camille thinks about walking in a field, ruining his stockings with chaff and flower-dust. He can’t decipher this. Whether the pain is real, imagined, remembered: whether he is only sad, he cannot say. D’Anton takes Gabrielle to bed every night, in summer. 

‘Repeat some of it,’ Fabre says gently. ‘No hesitations.’

‘Frigora mitescunt zephyris, ver proterit aestas interitura, simul pomifer autumnus fruges effuderit.’ 

‘No, of course you’d know that backwards. Your speech, if you ever want to – ’

Camille swallows. He could say Max’s speech perfectly. He still remembers every word. Thunder, far away, makes moan. ‘The king,’ he begins, stumbling.

‘Say it better,’ Fabre whispers.

‘The king has dismissed Necker,’ Camille says. And he goes on, calling Fabre to arms and to mercy. His voice distils itself. Even when Fabre lets him come, it’s less important than the words. 

*

_Where the Youth pined away with desire,_  
 _And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:_  
 _Arise from their graves and aspire,_  
 _Where my Sun-flower wishes to go._


End file.
